Slain Family Mourned

Killings Reverberate From South Florida Across Ocean To Remote Haitian Towns.

It was hard on a recent day to tell the neat ranch-style house at 8801 S. Crescent Drive from any other in the Knolls section of Miramar.

Sprinklers threw a fine spray on the freshly mowed lawn. A sign near the door said the house is protected by a home security company. There was a welcome mat outside the front door.

In the rear, a black-and-white rocking horse was on the patio and five child-size swimming rings floated in the pool.

The only clue that, one month ago, a horrible crime occurred in the home was a bright red notice pasted next to the front door. It read: "Biohazard. Authorized Personnel Only."

The notice has been there since April 30, when Marie Carmel Altidor, 29, her mother Theresia Laverne, 67, and Carmel's two children, Samantha, 3, and Sabrina, 6 weeks old, were found slain.

Police have revealed little about the investigation except that the killings were particularly vicious - Carmel was beaten, stabbed and shot, her mother was beaten and shot, and the children were beaten - and that it appears that no robbery was involved.

Detectives declined to say whether they have a suspect or a motive in the killings, although George Altidor, 33, Carmel's husband, has been questioned several times. He voluntarily has supplied detectives with handwriting and saliva samples, his lawyer, Vincent Farina, said.

Altidor has not spoken publicly about the killings.

According to a search warrant filed by Miramar police, evidence seized from the killing scene included a computer, a tape from a telephone answering machine, a caller ID device, bank records, 40 impressions of footprints, blood samples and shell casings. Police also took several black markers and a 9-by-12-foot section of wall board, which contained a written message. Police will not say what the message was.

The killings reverberated from South Florida, where hundreds of people attended the funerals of Carmel and her children, to the remote Haitian towns of Hinche, Thomonde and beyond.

Many questions about the killings remain unanswered. But all who knew the victims agree that the families of George and Carmel Altidor lived by the rules, made friends, prospered and were ambitious, hard-working people.

In Haiti, in the darkness that envelopes the mountain town of Thomonde on a moonless night, hundreds of people wait for the bus carrying the body of Theresia "Auntie Tillie" Laverne.

They come by burro or buffalo or walk for as many as 12 hours from farming villages named Hinche and Bernaco and Savannette. The American branch of the Laverne family comes by jet from Miami and Boston and New Orleans to Port-au-Prince, then makes the seven-hour car trip 90 miles into the hills on a twisted rock road.

News of the death of Tillie Laverne, slain while she was in Miramar helping care for Carmel's new baby, had spread by word-of-mouth from family members in Port-au-Prince to truck drivers who carried the news to Thomonde and other villages along the rutted road.

That morning, more than 2,000 people pressed into St. Joseph's Catholic Church, the largest building in Thomonde, population 5,000. They crowded onto rickety wood-slat benches whose steel legs bent with the weight, or they stood in the aisles.

George Altidor, who is from the neighboring town of Hinche and knew Carmel and the Lavernes since childhood, also attended the funeral of his mother-in-law and returned the same day to Miami. He has been in seclusion since the killings.

Until the tragedy, the lives of the Laverne and Altidor families, both well-known in the Haitian communities, had been blessed with love and respect and success.

"Mamie" Carmel, the third of five children born to Tillie and Ferdinand Laverne, grew up in a blue and white tin-roofed house with white lace curtains over the windows and doors.

Tillie Laverne was a seamstress who made clothes for people in town and conjured up an original rum recipe so popular that truckers would stop by in the middle of the night to pick up a glass of the fruitand honey-sweetened drink.

Carmel's father, the finance director for a Port-au-Prince high school, owns several farms nearby where he grows mangoes, bananas and corn.

The Lavernes, prosperous by Thomonde standards, were revered for their generosity to the less-fortunate. Tillie always brought food, clothes and money for the needy when she came back from the United States, and people came to her for counseling and to discuss their problems.

As in all large families, the children teased and fought and made up and shared and helped at home.

"When we were all going to school, we had breakfasts of rice, beans and plantains. You had to have it before school," said Carline Pierre, Carmel's next-oldest sister. "Carmel always said I took everything before I passed it to her."

A prim, pretty girl, Carmel was a good student at Marie Auxilliatrice, a Catholic elementary school just a block from the family home.